Burn Out

How do you differentiate the need to have a vacation or if you need another job?

 

I know I need a vacation. I've worked in a call center for close to 5 years and the longest vacation I've had was 5 days. Given that we work 24/7/365, there really isn't enough time to separate myself from work. It doesn't make a difference if it's Holy Week, Christmas, New Year. We don't have any long weekends. And even if we happen to be on day off for a particular holiday, some of our officemates aren't. There's never a chance to be with the officemates outside of work.

 

Even if I did go on a long leave from work, the actual work that I need to do will still pile up. Operations do not stop when we're away and we need to be constantly on call. This defeats the purpose of taking time off from work in the first place. Wich is why I refuse to check my work email when I'm on day off. I want to make sure I leave anything work related in the office. It has it's disadvantages but I don't want to work when I'm off.

 

Typhoon Frank

I'm stuck in the office while Typhoon Frank hits Makati. I'm not sure how big this typhoon is but I got soaked after walking for just 3 seconds. My clothes are soaked and I'm hungry.

Hi I'm Ross and I'm a Workaholic... II

Now that I was able to get enough sleep, let me expound on my last post.

I work in eTelecare, a call center in the Philippines. I started as an agent and after 2 1/2 years of taking calls, I was promoted to a team lead.

When I was an agent, we were given tasks by our direct supervisors. These tasks are normally their tasks but as is the practice in the company, we normally "help out" with our boss's tasks. This doesn't happen only to agents. The team leads are assigned tasks for the managers, the managers are assigned tasks for the directors...

It's a bad habit but everyone has gotten used to it that no one actually minds. There was an initiative before which asked everyone to focus on their job description but after a few weeks, things were back to the way they used to be. No one actually wanted to let go of the tasks assigned to them.

This includes me. I am tasked to maintain the program's roster and to assign the schedules to the agents. This is normally done by the managers but as mentioned above, the team leads do it. These tasks alone were not the reason I stayed in the office for mre than 32 hours. Of course, I still had other things to do. The main reason why I had to stay in the office for that long was because I was on leave for 2 days. The work will just ile up if I'm not there and no one else is going to do them so I had to finish everything before I left. That's the main reason I stayed so long.

It's an absurd situation. It's never ideal to have employees stay for more than their normal work hours. But this is for my future and I need to work hard.

Hi I'm Ross and I'm a Workaholic...

Hi Ross...

I arrived in the office 10pm of Wednesday. I left 6:30am of friday. Nuff said...